


From What I've Tasted of Desire

by WhenasInSilks



Series: Tumblr Fics [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark, M/M, Manipulation, Post-Iron Man 2, Pre-Avengers (2012), Self-Destructive Behavior, Temptation, some say the world will end in fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-06 04:39:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14634309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhenasInSilks/pseuds/WhenasInSilks
Summary: There's a ghost in Tony's window.He says that he's a god."Haven't you ever wanted to watch the world burn?"





	From What I've Tasted of Desire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [incandescent (lmeden)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lmeden/gifts).



> For incandescent, for the prompt "Loki."

“I wonder, do you miss it?”

Tony takes a sip from his tumbler, rolls the scotch across his tongue, savoring the smoked earth richness of it, the way the liquor sears the back of his throat as he swallows.

His words, when he speaks, are articulated in the deliberate manner of the very drunk. He doesn’t let it bother him.

“Miss what?”

“Dying.”

Tony feels the smile spread across his face almost without his intervention. Like an infection. Like something alive. “What a _fascinating_ question,” he drawls. “You know, no one’s actually ever asked me that before?” He takes another sip. “Would you believe me if I said no?”

The penthouse is brightly lit, but the sky beyond the window is black, blacker than any Manhattan night Tony has ever known. The black not of darkness, but of absence. It’s what the galaxy would look like, with every one of the stars burned out.

A window is all that separates him from the night, one sheet of glass between him and that yawning emptiness.

There’s a ghost in the glass.

He says that he’s a god.

* * *

Tony had scarcely noticed him the first time he’d appeared; had in fact taken him for his own reflection, before he remembered that the interiors of all the tower windows are treated with an anti-reflective coating.

He’d looked at the image, really looked at it, and seen, in the barest essentials, what he’d expected to see—a man leaning back against a table, drink in hand.

But the table wasn’t Tony’s sleek, modern confection, but something huge, rough-hewn and massy. The drink in the man’s hand came not in a cut glass tumbler but in something curved and organic looking, like a hollowed-out horn.

And the man…

Well, he wasn’t Tony, that’s for sure. As if Tony would ever be caught dead in those knock-off Ren-Faire duds.

Oh, he stood the way Tony stood, hip out, shoulders rolled back; even, upon investigation, moved the way Tony moved, but slower, more gracefully, and on a noticeable lag.

Almost as if…

Almost as if he was mocking Tony.

“Aren’t you a little old to be playing copycat?” he’d asked—sneered, really—because Pepper was in California and there was no one to care if he picked fights with his own drunken hallucinations. Then, when his not-reflection had only shrugged and taken another sip—entirely of his own accord—from his drinking vessel: “Who are you supposed to be, anyway, the ghost of Christmas past?”

A flash of teeth.

“Not Christmas.”

* * *

“Would you believe me if I said no?” Tony asks now, toying with his glass as though the question doesn’t matter.

The ghost tilts his head to one side, pretending to consider. A smile plays at the corners of his lips. It could mean anything.

“I might.”

Tony snorts. “Do you miss… whatever the fuck you were doing before you started haunting my penthouse?”

The ghost smiles into his shoulder, shaking his head as if Tony has said something indescribably foolish. “Oh, you arrogant little mortal, I am _so much more_ than the ghost in your window, if only you’d believe it.”

“Oh, so this is one of those chintzy faith-based things? Clap three times if you believe in Vikings? Anyway, you didn’t answer the question. I noticed,” he adds, and even he knows that the smugness in his voice is entirely disproportionate to the occasion, but fuck it, he’s drunk and past drunk, arguing with imaginary trickster gods in his living room.

“You _did_ ,” the ghost breathes, as if congratulating him. “They said you were clever. An answer for an answer? As fair a bargain as I’ve ever offered.”

Tony shrugs and sets his glass down on the table with a thud. He hadn’t intended to do it so heavily, but his movements are no longer entirely under his control.

“Sure. Why the hell not. You first.”

A tongue flicks out across pale lips. Tony knows they’re pale, even though their translucent shadow on his window surface really shouldn’t be enough data to go by—knows it in the same way he knows that the man’s eyes are blue as ice, that his skin would be cold to the touch. Another point in favor of this being a hallucination.

(He tries not to consider the other possibilities.)

“I do not,” the ghost says, and it’s a moment before Tony realizes he was answering Tony’s question.

Tony’s smile is lopsided, listing. It lacks ballast.

“Yeah, I’m calling bullshit on that one.”

A faint grimace acknowledges the point. “That should hardly surprise you. You know who I am.”

“Yeah, well. Never been big on religion.”

Tony picks up his tumbler and swirls the liquid inside, anticipating the taste, smoke and flame all at once. A bonfire in a glass.

“Sometimes,” he says. “I miss it sometimes.”

He’d spent nearly all of his adult life refining the art of controlled destruction.

He’d taught himself to fly.

Dying was neither of those things. Destruction, perhaps, but no control to it.

Dying was freefall. No limits that mattered, except the one.

“Is that why you are so intent on destroying yourself?”

Tony’s eyebrows fly up. Now where the hell had _that_ come from?

The ghost nods at the glass in his hand.

Tony barks out a disbelieving laugh. Now his own hallucinations are ganging up on him.

“You calling me an alcoholic?”

The ghost clicks his tongue, shakes his head like he’s disappointed. “I call you what you are, a tightrope walker on the edge of oblivion. You tempt fate, Tony Stark. Do not be so surprised when it tempts you in return.”

“Never been crazy about ‘cryptic,’ either,” Tony remarks.

A sigh. “If you persist in this… behavior, it will kill you.”

“So will life,” Tony retorts, “if you wait long enough. Alcohol’s not the worst way to go. Least it’s got…” He flounders, casting around for a word.

“Pedigree?” the ghost offers, dry as bone.

Tony snorts. “Sure.”

The ghost regards him for a long moment, like someone watching a particularly intriguing ant. “What an odd, twisted-up creature you are. I can feel your hunger. It called to me across worlds.”

“Thanks,” Tony says, “but I already ate.”

The ghost lets out a sigh that might be a laugh. “Oh, you hunger, son of Howard. Make no mistake of that. So desperate for destruction and so frightened of what that might mean that you visit those urges upon yourself. You could be something magnificent, if only you could find the courage.” His voice drops low, seductive. “Haven’t you ever wanted to watch the world burn?”

For all this talk of burning, Tony is suddenly cold. “Look, I don’t know how fast news travels in the netherworld, but I don’t do that kind of thing anymore.”

“What kind?”

“The scorched earth kind.”

“ _Anymore_ ,” the god—no, ghost, only a ghost—mocks. “You never burned a thing in your life. You built, and buried yourself in your whiskey and your work and your women while others did the burning for you.”

“It’s called delegating. You should try it sometime.”

“I am.”

 _It’s not working_ , Tony wants to say, but how do you lie to the god of lies?

“Fire is not in my nature,” the god says. “But it is in yours.”

Tony shuts his eyes, and he’s back in Afghanistan, watching the camp vanish as fire blossoms, red and gold, like a rose in the desert.

He wishes he didn’t find it so beautiful.

“Born to burn, huh? Not like I haven’t heard that one before.”

“It is in your nature,” Loki repeats. “How long can you deny its call?”

“I’m Tony fucking Stark. I can deny anything I damn well please.”

A soft laugh sends shivers down his spine, sends the hairs pricking up along the back of his neck. “Oh, little liar.” It’s as if the words are being spoken right into his ear. Tony very determinedly does not open his eyes. “I think perhaps you were made for me.”

Tony wants to argue, but how the hell do you argue with your own demons?

He takes refuge in irreverence.

“Is that a come on?”

A puff of cold air moves past Tony’s face, a draft where no draft should be. “Would you like it to be?”

Tony’s been having dreams, lately, dreams so vivid that the waking world seems to pale in comparison.

He dreams of a world in flames. Red and gold.

He swallows. His voice comes out raspy and unfamiliar. “Will I remember this tomorrow?”

A hum of consideration. “It seems unlikely, but you may yet surprise us both.”

Tony swallows again. Nods. Opens his eyes.

“Get the fuck out of my window,” he says.

The figure in the glass tips its hand in mocking salute, and vanishes.

Tony can’t seem to stop shivering.

“JARVIS,” he snaps.

“Sir?”

“Turn the heat up, it’s freezing in here.”

A fraction of a pause. “The temperature in the penthouse is currently set at 75 degrees. Might I suggest—”

“ _Turn up. The heat._ ”

“…very good, sir.”

Tony thinks of dams bursting, of forest fires, of disasters natural and man-made. Downs his glass and pretends like the burn is something he knows how to contain.

_It is in your nature._

Pretends like the colors of his dreams don’t blaze brighter than anything in life.

_How long can you deny its call?_

It’s just the whiskey, after all. It’s only the whiskey.

_Haven’t you ever wanted to watch the world burn?_

Tony pours himself another glass, and pretends that the night isn’t coming when he’ll forget to say no.

* * *

In his dreams, the heart of the fire burns blue as ice.

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place after Thor and IM2 but before the first Avengers film. A what if for "what if Tony's maladaptive coping habits didn't vanish just because he stopped dying" and "what if Loki came to Tony, rather than Erik Selvig."
> 
> Original post [here](http://whenas-in-silks.tumblr.com/post/172555160525/tumblr-prompts-loki) or find me at my designated Marvel blog [here](http://sister-stark.tumblr.com/).


End file.
